This is a power point presentation I gave at a La Leche League Conference in Washington DC on July 3, 2005.

Click here to open the file.

This was written for a trade magazine for the food industry called Middle East Food.

Click here to download the pdf file.

Click here to open the pdf file as webpage.

Click here to download the pdf file.

Click here to open the pdf file as webpage.

This paper was written in preparation for a talk I was asked to give at the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action Partners Meeting in Salvador, Brazil on July 23, 2001. I was too late arriving for there to be time for me to give it, but here it is, presenting my thoughts on the international breastfeeding promotion “movement” today.

In some sense breastfeeding promotion is right back in the same crisis situation is faced 20 years ago: there is too little money to do much. Indeed, the basis for undertaking powerful actions on behalf of breastfeeding may in some sense be weaker now. We’ve lost the sheen of being something new, “sexy.” In many countries policy makers are content with current levels of breastfeeding, not realizing how important and rare exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) is. The nutrition community, for one, perceives breastfeeding as having received if anything too much money and attention compared to other issues. And media attention now comes only when something anti-breastfeeding comes along.

Is there some kind of backlash against breastfeeding among elite women who resent being told so often now that they are raising their infants in an inferior way? Maybe they more often have positions of power or influence in the media than they did 20 years ago, particularly in North America where they have so little support and yet so much reach in the communication media and cultural impact. Maybe we need a project with high visibility to shame the US by providing “development assistance” to American women in key positions!

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What is the International Code?

Big corporations are the winners in today’s world, with earnings far beyond many countries’ gross national products, let alone government budgets. One of the most advanced tools so far developed in regulating the behavior of private enterprise is the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. It was passed by the World Health Assembly (WHA) in 1981 with the USA, due to Ronald Reagan’s personal intervention, casting the only dissenting vote. Some 20 countries have implemented it as law and dozens of others have implemented part of it as law or all of it as a voluntary measure. This can be taken as a sign of how seriously threats to breastfeeding have been taken in world policy-making bodies and by governments.

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Some history

Probably the roots of the “Policymakers’ Meeting: Breastfeeding in the 1990s A Global Initiative” that was held here at the Innocenti Center in Florence on July 30-August 1, 1990 go back to a meeting held by USAID in December 1985. Many leading breastfeeding advocates were present and general dissatisfaction was expressed with the support the donor agencies were giving to breastfeeding. The late Dr. Derrick Jelliffe was particularly upset with the lack of breastfeeding in UNICEF’s program at that time: Growth monitoring, Oral Rehydration, Breastfeeding and Immunization (GOBI). He said that it should be called GObI.

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This is a literature review and a denunciation of the way the international community was viewing and working with this issue. This was written BEFORE the adoption of AFASS criteria as a basis for counselling the HIV+ mother to avoid breastfeeding. It was designed to complement the two-part series Breastfeeding Review had just published by Pamela Morrison.

Click here to download the pdf file.

Image:  Indonesian milk nurse, Bulletin Nestle Mar 1971

Should we cooperate with the baby food industry?  To find out whether a particularly scientist cooperates with the infant food industry, you can check at the Integrity in Science website. You can also email them information on potential conflicts of interest you are aware of.

Big corporations are the winners in todayés world, with earnings far beyond many countriesé gross national products, let alone government budgets. One of the most advanced tools for regulating the behavior of private enterprise is the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes.

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This is the first trade book published by the World Bank on nutrition. It is based on, but expands and updates the Zimbabwe Nutrition Review of 1991. My coauthor Julia Tagwireyi was (and still is) the chief nutritionist for the Zimbabwean government.

Click here to view the scanned version on the World Bank website.

Image: card from Tanzania, Nyumba ya Sanaa

Breastfeeding should only be promoted where priority is also being placed on protecting it and supporting the breastfeeding mother.

I began publishing articles in around 1980 presenting a new idea on how programs should focus not just on promotion, but rather first on the protection and support of breastfeeding. This version was published years later.

Click here to download a scanned pdf file from the Cornell monograph where it was published.